[H-GEN] Problems with RAM

Dennis Purcell t.purcell at mailbox.uq.edu.au
Wed Jun 25 01:17:45 EDT 1997


I've been having problems with some 16MB chips and I was wondering
whether anyone has had any experience of this before. The story is
tediously complicated (complicatedly tedious!!) so I'll start at the
begining.
Okay, I've just upgraded my box to a P166 with 2*32MB EDO RAM (leaving
two slots to expand at a later date) and given my dad my 120 chip and
4*16MB EDO RAM chips (BTW the shop wanted $50 to put in the 166 and
2*32's - a two minute job. I told him where to go.)
My old RAM works fine on my machine.  I got 2*16MB originally and the
other 2 chips at a later date (i.e. 2 chips each from a different
manufacuter which I'll call A1 and A2 and B1 and B2 for clarity). But
transfering them over to my dad's machine doesn't work. His mother board
is a ZEOS 100-0055-03  Assembly No. 010-0052-03C  (U.S. purchased - very
nice layout with enough room to use your elbows to move the jumper
pins.) which has 6 simm slots. He's got 2*8MB chips on his board already
and adding B1 and B2 brings it to 48MB. Okay so far.
However, adding A1 and A2 only brings it up to 56MB - an additional 8MB
rather than the expected 80MB. Setting the bios for OS Support for more
than 64MB has no effect. Swapping the chips around in various
combinations of 2 (A1A2, A1B1, A1B2, A2B1 .... you get the idea) brings
up an unusual result. It doesn't matter what combination I have, if the
combination contains either A1 or A2, the bios registers 8MB instead of
16MB. The suspect chips, A1 and A2 have a serial number on the back of
the board - P1004B734000 B7340, L66N engraved on the front of the board,
and on the chips themselves - ACE EC83004J-60 DH7186.

My immediate reaction was that there was something wrong with the chips,
but I'll reiterate, these chips work fine on my machine. My second
reaction is that perhaps it was something with the 6 simm slots - as
I've only seen 4 slot boards before, but putting A1 and A2 in the other
banks made no difference at all, neither did having only 2 chips in the
slots rather than all of the chips. My last reaction was to keep the
chips for myself since they work on my machine. Besides, you can never
have too much RAM :-)

Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter?


TIA

Tim Purcell
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: vcard.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 360 bytes
Desc: Card for Dennis Purcell
URL: <http://lists.humbug.org.au/pipermail/general/attachments/19970625/31c07efe/attachment.vcf>


More information about the General mailing list